Tag Archives: google docs

Heather and I have been working together collaboratively for a few years. I thought a peek into how we do our planning might be interesting to some people.

Over the past week Heather and I have been working on the story the Monkey’s Paw with our class. It is time to keep moving along. This time, I chose the classic Canadian story To Build A Fire by Jack London for us to work with.

Heather and I live 2 700 kms apart so tools like skype, twitter, email and google docs allow us a series of channels to work though. So as I sat down at my kitchen table and began building a structure for us I knew we would be making use of all of these tools. I started with a Google document with some simple lesson plan outlines laid out. We will work through a day of pre reading activities, a few days of reading and then move on to post reading ideas. There is nothing ground breaking in the content and structure of these lessons. Heather and I have managed to break a lot of boundaries, but this set of lessons isn’t about breaking new ground in content. They are mostly focused on getting our students working together and practicing the skills they will need to do that. So, after I had finished a draft of his document I shared it with Heather for her to take a look at, comment on and make any revisions or adjustments. This has to be a collaborative process as we both have a lot of outcomes that we need to meet.

Following this, I begin making up a series of nine documents that we are going to use with our students for the pre and post writing activity. Heather and I have already shared class lists and email addresses for our students so this is a simple matter of making up the activities that we want and sharing them with all of the kids who are in that group. Here is an example of what we are going to do for a pre reading activity for this story. The first day we are working on this story we will start off the day of the lesson with a quick skype call and make some connections between kids and communities. Following this, students from each class will head to their google docs account where they will have an individual and a group activity to complete. Heather and I will split the supervision of the chatrooms that goes with each document, jumping back and forth between the nine groups ensuring that the students are on task, productive and practicing good online collaboration skills.

After these pre reading activities are completed, we will begin reading the actual story. We do this over skype. We will begin the morning with a call, any quick news items and then one of us will read. We have set up a Today’s Meet chatroom for each day that we will read. As the teacher in one classroom reads aloud to all of the students, the other will supervise all of the students in the chat, keeping them focused on the topic and also posting questions and ideas for everyone to consider. (Here ‘s a chat that we used for the story The Monkey’s Paw.) When we finish the reading for the day, we always have the students post their ideas on a linoit bulletin board. (Here’s a bulletin board from The Monkey’s Paw)

We think that the reading of this story will take us two days over skype. Following this we will move the students into a post writing activity. For this story that will involve the students listening to an mp3 of another version of this story as well as completing a task on a group google doc. We’ve also got a few reflection questions for our students to take a look at since at that point they will have finished working with two different texts:

POST READING STUDENT REFLECTION QUESTIONS

1.) While we have read these two stories, I have mostly used the chatrooms to…. (ask questions, socialize, post quotes, post comments, post random thoughts, etc)

2.) I have found the bulletin boards each day helpful / not helpful to help me to think about the reading that day. Why?

3.) How is using these kinds of tools for learning as opposed to socializing different? How is it different working with partners 2 700 kms away?

I started these documents and then shared them with Heather. She was online while I was doing this planning so we talked about a few things, made a adjustments to our plans and are now ready to move ahead.

There is nothing ground breaking in our lesson plans. Pre reading, reading and post reading activities similar to what you would find in many classrooms. What is different is the added value that is brought in the collaboration and the skills that the students (and teachers!) need to focus on when you work in this way. We are not breaking new ground for our students in the content of these lessons, But we are pushing them to use these tools in ways that support learning, collaboration and gaining new perspectives.

It’s 8 AM. School here starts at 9. I’ve been in my classroom working for almost an hour when I start thinking about what today will be like:

– the 3D printer in my classroom has been running since I arrived here. I’ve had a few problems dialing it in, but with a few final adjustments this morning, the quality looks great and I’ve got a backlog of student made projects to print out. It will probably take a few days to catch up.

– My Idea Hive partner, Heather Durnin and I are working on the story the Monkey’s Paw with our students. Our classrooms are 2700 kms apart, but over the past two days we’ve had kids form up into groups and have played vocabulary bingo between our two classrooms. Today, we are going to actually begin reading the story. As well as reading it live on skype between our two classes, we are also recording it on 105thehive radio so that other classes can listen in if they wish. We have a chatroom set up for the kids to use while we are reading the story and a linoit bulletin board for them to post their ideas on after we have finished our reading for today. We need to talk with our students about appropriate use of chatrooms for learning as it is a different skill set than simply using these kinds of tools for socializing.

– My high school web design class started on some simple video editing yesterday. Today, a grade 12 student in our school is coming to show off some of his imovie creations that he made in a class of mine last year. After that, we are spending some time hunting down trailers old cartoons and archival footage from archive.org to put into our own original remixes.

– Later today we are going to use Khan Academy videos to practice a few geometry skills that we are struggling with. I’m not a huge user of Khan Academy and I’ve read many critiques of the site, but I am willing to use any resource I can find to help when my students struggle. I think that the site has a good set of tutorials and practice exercises on this topic and I am willing to use them.

– Finally, my students have to finish up their writing of a fantasy story that they have been working on. We usually use Google docs for any kind of writing like this. It makes revising and editing easy. It makes it easy to work on something here and at home as well. It also lets students share their work between each other and me to get some feedback as they go.

I’ve been teaching for almost 20 years. Any one who thinks education isn’t changing and isn’t more powerful now than in the past needs to spend more time in classrooms.

As a small town mayor and a teacher, I am an absolute realist. I live in a world of budget constraints, committees and compromise. I live in a complex world that is filled with data, with the realities of sometimes difficult lives and with constantly competing priorities.

But I’m also an idealist. This brings out the other side of my teaching hat where I want the very best for the kids I work with and it also shows up in my time as a Roman Catholic lay minister in my local parish church. As an idealist, I like to work in small ways at building a better world. A world that is more fair and just and a world where there is potential for change in all of our lives.

Over the past few months I’ve become increasingly concerned at revelations over online privacy. While I was never naive enough to believe that what I was doing online was completely private, I was surprised to learn about the scale of those operations. As a realist, I struggle to understand the need for control over this kind of data. As an idealist, I worry about the long term consequences of these programs and question their morality.

As one person I can’t change the world, but I can make changes in my own life.

1.) I’ve moved both of my websites to new servers and hosts outside of the US. My wesbsites (this blog and ideahive.org, my classroom community) have been hosted in the US with Bluehost ever since I made the move to self hosting and working with WordPress. Bluehost is a good host with great customer service who helped me get back on my feet several times after those technical bumps in the road that we all have. But in the end, I wanted to move my sites to a place where the laws are written more carefully to respect the creation of digital works. So over the past several weeks I’ve moved both of these sites to a hosting company called 1984 (irony fully intended) in Iceland. As a Canadian, Iceland may be a strange choice, but this has to do with my idealist side. Since their economic crash in 2008, Iceland has enacted the IMMI (Iceland Modern Media Initiative), which are the strongest set of laws in the world protecting the freedom of digital information and communication. My websites are innocuous. The blog of a classroom teacher in a small remote Canadian community and a classroom community built for middle school students. There is nothing needing whistleblower or dissident protection. But I’ve decided to support this initiative of modern laws and protections by bringing my business to a hosting company in Iceland. Consider it my $70 contribution to the cause.

2.) I’ve switched browsers from Chrome to Firefox. Chrome is fast and slick and I moved to it pretty quickly once it got moving. But I wanted to support a company working on open source initiatives and education. I wanted a browser that was easier to use in a do-not-track mode. I used to be a fan of Firefox when it first came out and I have been very pleased with it since I’ve moved back. I haven’t found any difference in speed between it and Chrome at all. It is stable and solid. Mozilla is also a company that is pushing for the web to be more open and transparent. They are pushing initiatives such as Open Badges and Webmakers. As an educator, these are things I can get behind.

3.) I’ve moved (mostly) from using Google to DuckDuckGo. This search engine has received a lot of press about their do-not-track initiatives, and, as with any business, they are running with it. I don’t blame them. Take the good publicity when you can. For the most part, DuckDuckGo is a powerful tool that searches up any information that I need as fast as I can get it from Google. This is true of basic stuff. I still head back to Google occasionally when I am looking for a specific piece of news or an image, but for most everything else, I’m breaking the habit.

4.) I’ve reaffirmed my belief in the power of open source projects. As I’ve written and spoken about at conferences previously, much of educational technology’s history was founded on open source projects. In the past few years I think we’ve lost much of that and given away control over many of our tools. There is no doubt that many corporations have designed powerful software for use in education. But I believe that we have given up a lot of control over both our own and our student’s data as a result. As well, we have also lost control over the design and capabilities of our learning environments. I think we are moving towards closed off proprietary silos. In my mind, education and learning are about sharing our perspectives and connecting with others. Closed platforms only let us see other people like us who are willing to pay the same bills we are.

I would like to say that I have plans in my classroom to leave all of the closed spaces behind. But I can’t. We aren’t there yet. There is no good open source substitute for a Skype call or a Google Hangout. Google docs (which is a cornerstone of collaboration in my classroom) doesn’t have an open source alternate. But I will keep searching for these things and work with open tools as a first choice. I’m not alone in this. Since the beginning of the NSA / Snowden scandal, the use of cloud computing facilities is down over 10% and some people are predicting a $35 billion loss to the cloud computing industry.

5.) Finally, I am leaving Gmail behind. I’ve been on gmail for years. I was one of the people who needed an invite to score up one of the coveted accounts at the beginning. But just as I set up my own hosting account to run my websites from, I’ve decided to move my email to the same space.

My new main email address will be: glassbeed@evenfromhere.org

I’ve decided to preserve the prefix (spelling error and all) and keep the story.

My gmail address is still functioning and will forward email to this new account. I’m sure it will take some time to get everything moved in that direction. It’s a process.

I live in the real world and tackle complex, real problems. But I also see the need for us to make careful choices in how we work and what we do. I’m making some choices and voting with my feet and my wallet.

Our students in the Idea Hive are currently working on collaborative presentations. This means that groups have been formed with some kids from Snow Lake and some from Wingham in each. The trouble has been working between the research space and the presentation space. Google docs has chatrooms that we use all of the time. Our kids are well experienced in chatting through a learning sequence, working out group roles and solving problems that way. Unfortunately, google presentations has never had a simple chatroom to work in while you are doing the actual editing of a presentation. You could chat while the presentation is being presented, but not while planning. This was causing us some difficulties as kids jumped back and forth between different spaces.

That has now changed.

An update to google docs has changed this so a chatroom (and other new presentation options as well) now exists. But the chatroom and new options only exists if you update your document settings. A few steps to this.

Step One:

Step Two (and three)

and that’s all there is to it. This will give you a chatroom in presentation editor mode – but only on new presentations that are created after you update your settings. It will also give you more editing options for the presentations themselves. One more step up for this tool.

Thanks to the students from Wingham who discovered this today and passed it along to their teachers…

Once this process finished, we moved into collaborative writing mode where each day students worked in small groups on google docs to work on writing a field guide to Molching, the fictional town at the centre of The Book Thief, the novel we had read. Once again, students talked on skype, worked in chatrooms and used a number of tools to pull together an guide book that was 85 pages long. We pulled all of their pictures and writing together and moved over to Lulu.com where we published the entire thing. (You can order a physical copy if you want. The entire piece is also available here as a free pdf)

This process took months. We started reading the novel in November and didn’t finish writing the our book until May. While we didn’t work every day together due to scheduling conflicts, snow days, ice days, professional development, etc., etc we did take many hours of classroom time to completed this process.

And I don’t regret a single one.

The looks on the faces of the students when the boxes were opened and the real, physical books came out, was worth every moment of frustration.

But more than that, after seventeen years of teaching, this process taught me more about reading and writing using new tools than any other project in the past.

1.) Writing has been a solitary action in the past only because this was the only mode available. When authors sat down with a pen and paper to write a novel or a poem, they were by themselves simply because only one person could physically occupy the space of a piece of paper at one time. But having a small group of students collaborate on a single piece of writing, no matter if they are 2 700 kms apart, has changed my thoughts on this. There is great power in having students work together to make a single sentence just right. There is power in having them set roles in a chat room and then work together, day after day, on document after document, to build something together. Writing, revising and then editing a single document together teaches students about good writing.

2.) Reading aloud makes a lot of things happen. We read this book aloud to two classrooms full of students each day over skype. While one of us was reading, the other worked in a backchannel with all of the students in it. We posed questions for them about what they were hearing, but mostly, we took part as one of them. We listened along as they did. We responded ourselves to what we were hearing. We cried and laughed along with them. We marvelled at the hundreds of comments that scrolled by in chatrooms every single day. We learned that when we read to students, while they often look passive, sitting in a desk listening to the story as it flows by them, there is endless possibilities going on inside of them. At the end of each day’s reading, we had the students post a response on a sticky wall. Again, sometimes we let a question for them, but often we just looked to them for their responses. We were often amazed at what we found.

3.) Its’s all about the connection. We had days where we couldn’t connect. Skype broke down on us several times. Snow days and ice days saw Heather and I exchanging messages before the school day began. Professional development days interrupted schedules. Trips and travels left students with substitute teachers who had no idea of how we were doing what we were doing. But through all this, the kids would comment: “we missed you yesterday. How are you?” We’d bug each other about hockey scores. Our cold weather in Snow Lake became a constant source of amazement for students in much warmer Southern Ontario, while their early spring left us jealous. Each day, bit by bit, with each piece of information, call, blog post and comment, we gres into a learning community. Students showed up in chatrooms when they were travelling or home from school sick. They wanted to be there.

4.) Watching kids write is cool. Writing with a group of kids on a google doc is amazing. Blank documents surrounded by ideas in chatrooms soon filled up with brainstormed thoughts. The formatting changed to notes as they researched. Finally, some enterprising student would step up and begin writing a first draft. Others would chime in, add new paragraphs and pieces. Others would start revising and soon a document emerged. You just can’t do this stuff on paper. We simply didn’t have access to this kind of information. New tools bring us new understandings of how things happen.

Many steps. Many hours. Great learning for students. Great learning for teachers. This is the stuff that classrooms can be about.

We’ve been spending a lot of time lately writing in my classroom. Along with our thinwalled partner class in Wingham Ontario, we are spending 45 minutes to an hour each day trying to figure out what writing can be when the tools change.

One of the defining features of writing has always been the solitary nature of the task. One person sits down in a quiet room (or a crowded classroom) and spends a few minutes (or a few years) completing a task. The solitary nature of writing can be a frustration for students, and for teachers trying to help students improve their skills.

In the Idea Hive we read the novel The Book Thief over Skype. What we’ve been doing is writing a field guide to the town of Molching, the main setting of the novel. The students came up with several dozen people, places, events, etc from the book that all needed research and explanation. Once this brainstorming was finished, they chose their own groups and dove into writing.

Each day at the assigned time, the students sign into their google docs account and meet their partners in the chatroom. They usually spend a few minutes catching up from yesterday, talking about the weather, what they did last night, or their plans for the day. After this, they start working. While different groups have had different methods, it has been common that one or two students (out of 4 in a group – two from Snow Lake and two from Wingham) actually write the document. The other students may be off researching the topic and bringing information back and post it in the chatroom or their notes on the document itself. Depending on where they are in the process, other students may be working on editing and revising paragraphs that had previously been written. While this is happening, a constant chatter takes place in the chatroom. Students talk about revisions and edits that are needed. They talk about possibilities for inclusion or exclusion. They look at the writing from an organizational point of view, talking about pieces and paragraphs that need to be moved to other places in the piece. All of this happens while Heather and I jump between chatrooms, switching between groups, offering help and guidance for the process as it is happening.

Overall, the main feature of writing this way has been collaboration. Students have to work together, to question, to bring new content to the document and to solve conflicts as they arise. We have kept a document between our classrooms that is called Knowledge Care. Occasionally, we will have students add their thoughts to it, focussing on techniques for solving conflicts, for working as effective group members and for helping others to write effectively. We refer back to this with our classes when things need sorting out.

It has been fascinating to work with students like this. As teachers we have been able to deeply immerse ourselves in the writing process; watching students write, revise and edit as they do it – live. We can interact with them, offering guidance and advice as they are working. As a veteran teacher of writing, I have learned a lot about how students write that I simply never had access to in the past – a window like this into their thought processes. Teachers often only see pieces of writing as they are completed (or as specific parts are completed), but with google docs, a chatroom and a group of students, we can instead offer guidance as pieces are being written; the true meaning of formative assessment.

Talking with my students about this process, they feel the pieces of writing they are completing are much better written then anything they could have completed alone. They have said that while they sometimes feel frustrated by group members or by the speed of the process (getting consensus from four group members obviously makes things move at a slower speed then a single student writing alone), they understand fully the value that is added to the process by having multiple people working on a single document. They have wondered about moving to groups of two instead of four and of having more specific roles assigned to group members (both legitimate suggestions) but overall, this process has been excellent for their skills. One student went as far to tell me last week that when he is writing alone now, he feels lonely and misses the added voices to help him along in the process.

In the end, we plan on publishing our Field Guide to Molching online and on paper using a service like lulu.com so that all of the students can have a copy of what they have accomplished together.

As I write this, a massive earthquake has recently taken place in Japan, followed by a tsunami only hours ago. It has recently passed the Hawaiian islands and is still headed for the Pacific coast of North America.

As my class of grade seven and eight students came in this AM I started with this video:

Many of them had heard early reports at home about this and a few of them had obviously watched the news. We discussed the fact that the tsunami was still moving and predictions were being made about where it might hit next and the possible damage.

We had a discussion in class about how the web was changing to allow us access to real time news. We talked about things like hashtags and realtime searches. We discussed the effect of Youtube and flickr on this sort of breaking news culture. Someone found the Wikipedia page of this event and was amazed to see the breadth and detail of it. At that point it had already been edited over 500 times.

Earlier I had posted on twitter about this event and my teaching partner, Heather Durnin was online even though her school was having a snow day. Heather agreed to take part in a skype call from home and emailed her students (who were also at home) about the fact that we were going to be working on a document to collect as much current, breaking information on this event as we could. So a quick skype call later, students from my class and some kids from Heather’s class (who were at home remember, having a snow day) logged on to a single shared google doc and collected information, updates, questions and predictions about the long term impact this might have. A quickly moving chatroom flowed by and Heather and I chimed in clarifying points with students, suggesting things for them to look up and posing questions for them.

In the end, we ended up with this document. While many of the early facts on this will change, be proven wrong, and be updated as the news from the situation around the Pacific is clarified, this was a great experience for students as they learned about real time news online, the power of the web, and collaboration in action.

I’ve recently run into the concept of knowledge care. (downloadable pdf here) Having to do with learning communities, this concept teaches us that academic understanding, knowledge and output should only be half of the “product” we are interested in when we are working with students.

This article gave examples of corporations that are involved in global collaborations. It stressed that the innovation or product are only half of what is important that comes of these collaborations. The other half is the knowledge about taking part in work like this. A time of reflection, of bringing together knowledge gained about working in these ways.

Sounds like a great idea, so Heather Durnin and I, in our thinwalled classroom have taken up this challenge. Heather and I currently have our students collaborating on a final project to do with the novel The Book Thief. We’ve read the novel over skype and supported our students with a daily chatroom and a sticky wall for questions and reflections each day. Now that the novel is completed, the students are working on a field guide to the town of Molching, the place where the majority of the novel takes place. The students have come up with a list of people, places and events from the book. They have self organized themselves into groups, and using google docs, are beginning to write this field guide.

So far we only have had a few classes together working on this, but Heather asked her students to reflect on the process of learning online together. What they have come up with so far is quite interesting:

– People work at different speeds. Slow down and be patient. Not all of us are alike and we all work at different speeds.
– Not all people are comfortable participating right away. Ask them some literal questions to get them involved – something they will no the answer to.
– If someone is deleting your work, ask them to stop, ask them for their opinion.
– Assign a recorder
– If someone is going off track, don’t follow. In fact, don’t be scared to tell them to get back on track.
– It’s important to socialize and get to know your partner.

We’ll be adding to this document as time goes by. It is shared between the two classes and is something we are going to spend time reflecting on with our classes.

These reflections have nothing to do with the academic outcomes the students were asked to focus on. Yet, these are the skills, the scaffolding that make these types of collaboration possible. Powerful learning on the part of the students.